Despite of their methodological and practical significance mixed-methods-designs have so far largely been neglected by political science. In this working paper, we elaborate a mixed-methods-design combining qualitative methods, such as expert interviews and document analysis, and quantitative...

This paper analyzes the importance of governance of international organizations (IOs) to Swiss policy making in the field of education. The focus is on the Bologna Process driven by the European Commission, and the 'Programme for International Student Assessment' (PISA) of the Organization for...

Far-reaching transformations in Swiss education were pushed in the last decade by two prominent international initiatives, namely the 1999 Bologna process and the OECD's PISA study starting in 2000. To what extent and in which way were these soft governance initiatives able to trigger Swiss...

Public policy shapes the lives of individuals, and even more so if they depend on state support. But to what extent can well-being differences between individuals living in different European states be traced back to the specific national public policy designs? This paper tests the intervening...

This paper analyses the effect of unemployment insurance generosity and active labour market policy on reemployment stability in Europe. Using EU‐SILC and OECD data, we conduct discrete time survival analyses with shared frailty specification to identify policy effects at the micro and macro...

This paper investigates the impact of interindustry wage distribution on structural change in the Swedish and US manufacturing sector in the 1970s. Structural change in the centralized Swedish labour market reacts far more positive to market pressures towards wage changes than structural change...

The EU suffers from a democratic deficit that arises not first and foremost from a lack of institutional competencies, but rather from the double weakness of politics vis-à-vis economics and law at the European level. This “functional democratic deficit” renders the existing mechanisms of...